If you have to think about blocking,,,, you will be too late. Worse than that is if you tense up whenever you have to defend yourself,,,, put these two together and it is best not to fight at all. But there is an answer,,, training. Most just think about punching, but punching is just an incidental part of battle. As I have said before,,, Movement, rotation and Balance are the three components to a succesful outcome. The blocking and punching need to become an automatic part of these functions and can not be performed seperately. So if it is important to survive,, a person must train the mind and body to work as one.
So keeping that in mind,, we trained with increasing aggressive attacks with evil intent. Meaning we were trying to hit each other,,, well, I was anyway. But in a nice way. No blood or injuries,,, just a few bumps and bruises. One common theme in receiving the bruises was that the body does not cross over the midline to defend itself without teaching it that the possibility exists. It is a lesson that needs to be learned,, it can not be explained. This becomes ever more evident when we started adding fakes and deception techniques to the attacks. Fighting becomes more about deception the more advanced a person becomes. Hiding the true intent of the attack will become natural,, but defending against the deception becomes very difficult. So hand position, movement and control of the opponents weapons become increasingly important. Motorboat and Fingerlickinggood paired up while Contra decided to train with YHC. We concentrated on the blocking of real (sort of) punches and then moved on to movement off of the midline when defending and attacking. It was a bit distracting at first but it appeared to become more natural once the practice continued.
Each of the pax has started to show the direction of their natural abilities. We each have natural abilities and these will make a different fighter out of each of us. No one person will move, think and strike like any other. It is important to learn all the techniques but just as important to follow the natural tendencies of your mind and body. These differences will become more evident the longer each trains. But these differences will also help each of us understand how to fight different types of people. understanding how a person body moves will allow each to understand how they think and fight. This will all become inate after a while and each will start surprising themselves when you start correctly stopping an attack before it truly begins.
It is always a pleasure to train with you fine men. Thank you for allowing me to share this art with you. I am honored and humbled.